


detrunco

by handydandynotebook



Series: dolor sicut ratio [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Blood, Dark Crack, Decapitation, Drug Use, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:00:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27149777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handydandynotebook/pseuds/handydandynotebook
Summary: Susan fantasizes about killing her husband the way people fantasize about winning the lottery. She never believes she could ever do it, up until the day she actually does.
Relationships: Neil Hargrove/Susan Hargrove
Series: dolor sicut ratio [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1984972
Comments: 13
Kudos: 21





	detrunco

**Author's Note:**

> just totally self-indulgent crack bc i'm horny for killer!susan.

Susan fantasizes about killing her husband the way people fantasize about winning the lottery. Affectionately, wistfully, knowing it will never actually come to be. She imagines all the ways she could end his life the same way people imagine all the fabulous luxuries they would buy upon cashing in the winning ticket. 

She knits scarves while Neil watches baseball games and imagines plunging the needles into his eyes. Wrenching them out, blood bursting forth from empty sockets, two squishy spheres impaled on her tools like cherry tomatoes on shish kebabs. 

“What are you smiling about?” Neil asks, looking over to her on commercial break. 

Susan lowers her partway done pattern and turns to him with soft eyes. “You, dear. You look exceptionally handsome this evening.” 

“Hm.” He arches a skeptical brow. “Are you buttering me up for those earrings you saw in the Sears catalog?” 

“Oh, no.” Susan lightly swats her hand. “I’m being honest. You look nice tonight, Neil.” 

And he does, in her mind, where he’s eyeless and screaming.

She chops bell peppers on her cutting board while Neil awaits dinner at the kitchen table, newspaper opened before him. She wonders what would happen if she sidled around behind his chair, knotted a hand in his hair and jerked his head up straight. If she dragged the knife in her opposite hand across his open throat. From ear to ear, all the way. 

She imagines blood spraying outward like the Old Faithful geyser, soaking the newsprint. Splattering the floor she’s just swept and scrubbed, down on her knees. How she wouldn’t even care that she’d have to clean it again. 

“You must be in a good mood, to be humming such a pretty song.” Neil glances up from his newspaper and fixes her with a fond smile. 

“I am,” Susan chirps pleasantly as she chops away. “I’m excited to try out this new recipe.”

“Well good,” Neil says, nodding his head. “It’s about time you’ve added something new to your repertoire. You know I think your meatloaf is the best there is, but a man can only have meatloaf so many times a week before he’s sick of it.” 

“Mhm.” Susan licks her teeth and continues chop, chop, chopping away. 

She starts her car and watches Neil fetch the mail in the mail box through the rearview mirror. She imagines jamming her foot on the gas and barreling backward in reverse at top speed. Thinks of the thunk his solid flesh would make against the bumper. Pictures him flying across the the street, landing in a broken heap upon unforgiving concrete. 

Susan checks all her mirrors and pulls out of the driveway at less than ten miles an hour, waving politely to Neil through the window before she embarks on her grocery trip. He doesn’t notice, doesn’t even look up from leafing through the mail. There’s a scowl on his face. Probably a bill or an obnoxious advertisement. 

Susan fantasizes about killing her husband the way people fantasize about winning the lottery. She never believes she could ever do it, up until the day she actually does. 

That is a day she comes home to a Neil strangely stoic in the living room and a stricken Max on the floor of her bedroom, biting back sobs with an arm cradled to her chest. She’s shaking violently, uncontrollably, yell-whispering with misty eyes as Susan peers in horror at the bump over her collarbone, the swelling of her unnaturally sloped shoulder. It was a skateboarding accident. That is what she tells Susan, what she won’t stop repeating, not in the car, not at the emergency room, not when she’s fitted with a sling she's to wear for the next six weeks. 

It was a skateboarding accident. This is what Max insists but she doesn’t have an answer when Susan asks why she didn’t go to Neil then, why he didn’t notice she was hurt if he was already home. 

Neil doesn’t have those answers either and the more Susan presses him, the more agitated he gets, ends their conversation with that warning edge in his voice he takes with Billy. Billy isn’t home for any of this. It’s the weekend and Susan probably won’t see Billy again until Monday morning, where he’ll almost certainly be hungover and probably receive more than just the warning tone from Neil. 

Or he would, anyway, if Neil were still to be here. 

Max has a broken clavicle she surely didn’t get from falling off her skateboard and suddenly everything becomes clear. Susan is destined to win the lottery after all. One of the lucky few with winning numbers on her ticket. 

Susan deliberates over nighttime creature features the best way to ensure Neil won’t be here in the morning. She picks up her knitting needles and sets them aside. She strokes her fingertips over the knife handles in the kitchen but shakes her head. They just don’t feel right. 

The knitting needles, too precarious. Eyes are small targets, what if she missed? 

The knives possibly can't cut deep enough quick enough. Neil can’t be given any opportunity to overpower her. 

Susan ruminates and recalls the axe in the garage. Neil had brought it earlier in the spring. To cut down the crabapple tree in the backyard Susan had so adored. 

“I know you're a tree-hugger, Susan, but something has to be done about it,” he’d said, swinging as if he were Paul Bunyan. “It attracts too many bees!” 

Neil was allergic to bees, to every single fuzzy buzzy black and yellow visitor the crabapple blossoms invited. Perhaps that was why Susan had liked the tree so much to begin with. 

The axe will do. It will get the job done but a messy job it’s going to be. Reality is very different from Susan’s fantasies. She doesn’t feel elation or excitement, or any euphoria. She’s scared. She’s scared and sick to her stomach, oh, but it must be done. Susan is afraid but what’s even more frightening than the thing she must do is the possibility of again coming home to Max injured in tears, to another skateboard accident that surely wasn’t any kind of accident at all. 

Susan considers breaking into the liquor cabinet, pouring herself some shots of liquid courage. But alcohol might make her sloppy. She absolutely can’t be sloppy. She holds her breath and slips into Billy’s room instead, rummages through his things for what she thinks might give her a better boost than booze. She’d noticed him sniffling the other day, before he went out, and while the kinder conclusion to come to would probably be a cold, her evidently correct conclusion was cocaine. 

Susan steals the little baggie from the nightstand drawer and squirrels it away to the kitchen. She cuts herself a line and snorts it through one of the neat little coffee straws she stores by the pot in a smooth tin canister. It burns before it numbs and then Susan’s crackling like a live wire from the inside out. Blood roars in her ears, heart a snare drum in her chest. 

She seizes the axe and hurries back into the house with the fleet stride of a doe darting through the field. She’s itchy all over, spider hatchlings skittering beneath her skin. There’s something so hideous surfacing inside that Susan doesn’t even want to think about, so she thinks about Max instead. 

Susan slinks into her bedroom stealthy as shadows receding before the sun. Raising the axe high above Neil’s sleeping form is possibly the hardest thing she’s ever done. But bringing it down is somehow the easiest. 

A heavy meaty sound cuts the air as the blade rends his neck. Neil’s eyes fly open. Blood spills from the corners of his lips as Susan struggles to work her weapon free, embedded in muscle and bone. Neil grabs at his ruined throat, spluttering more ugly noises as his lifeblood drenches the pillow, crimson spreading through the sheets beneath him. 

Susan finally works the blade free and Neil gurgles helplessly before she brings the axe down a second time. Breath rushes from her lungs as she’s coated in hot splatter. She feels sinews shearing under her hand, tastes a mouthful of something metallic. Wrenches the blade free with an effort, brings it down again. 

She swings the axe again, again, again, until her husband’s head is severed. She could stop there but she doesn’t. She doesn’t. She isn’t even thinking about _what_ she’s doing anymore, only that she is doing it and she doesn’t stop. She can't. She doesn't stop until she is forced to, until the handle is so slippery with blood, it slides right out of her hands. Bounces on the floor, more blood splattering across the carpet. 

Susan quivers breathlessly, staring down at a face so mutilated it isn’t recognizable, slashes crisscrossing slashes in a stew of raw meat, slivers and splinters of bone peaking through the revolting fleshy mess of it. 

Slowly, she backs away from the axe. She retreats into the master bathroom and shuts the door. Her head is buzzing like the hive that prompted Neil to cut down the crabapple tree, but Susan finds she doesn’t actually have coherent thoughts to hone in on. 

Susan doesn’t dare look in the mirror. She sits on the edge of the bathtub instead. Tries to catch her breath as she smears red across the faucet lever, supposing a shower is the most sensible decision she can make at this moment in time. 

**Author's Note:**

> may write more killer!susan fics. it's crack, ik, ik, i still don't even go here but. it's just. rly appealing to me.


End file.
